Albums by Pusha T and Ben Goldberg

Pusha T performing last year in New York. His latest mixtape, “Wrath of Caine,” is an aggressive work that features hard-nosed tales of the drug-dealing life.Credit
Shareif Ziyadat/FilmMagic, via Getty

“Drug-dealer Piacassos” is what Pusha T calls his songs in “Only You Can Tell It,” from his excellent new mixtape, “Wrath of Caine,” but that’s not quite right. Unlike Picasso, who was evasive and full of dark whimsy, Pusha T is a hard-nosed literalist. Maybe he’s Jacques-Louis David. Maybe he’s Gustave Courbet. Maybe he’s Weegee.

He’s been this way for more than a decade, first as one half of Clipse, the acclaimed duo he formed with Malice, his brother, and lately as a solo artist on Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music imprint, though, to be fair, less so there. Early Clipse recordings, particularly the first two volumes of the “We Got It 4 Cheap” mixtape series, rendered the logistical and emotional minutiae of the drug-dealer life with military precision. They were harrowing, chest-puffing records.

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At times it has seemed as if Pusha T has been too comfortable riding shotgun with Mr. West; the serrated edge that often marked his voice was smoothed over, the subject matter diluted. But he’s had a couple of great moments in recent years: a staggering verse on Mr. West’s “Runaway” and also a sly turn on the remix of Chief Keef’s “I Don’t Like.”

And “Wrath of Caine” is Pusha T coming full circle, a stark and aggressive album that’s his best work in years. He sounds sharp and determined, a technician who has rediscovered his gifts, in part by rediscovering his muse. That would be the wages of the drug game, which he has few peers in capturing.

This is a controlled album that, in its way, is as rowdy as Waka Flocka Flame’s 2010 debut, “Flockaveli,” the high-water mark for recent hip-hop aggression. (There’s also a surprising amount of reggae on “Wrath of Caine,” from the hook of “Blocka” to the vocal interludes by a mouthy Jamaican woman, adding to the album’s rough 1990s sheen.) The production is overwhelming: menacing pianos and booming horns on “Millions,” staggering keys on “Revolution,” smooth early-Kanye-esque gospel-soul on “I Am Forgiven.”

Pusha T’s verses come with hard corners: “Squeeze off on him/Leave cross on him/By the time the body’s found it’s peat moss on him,” he raps coolly on “I Am Forgiven.” And he’s lately learned to soften the package without softening the content, as on “Trust You,” with the entrancing Kevin Gates, a love song for a tragic circumstance: “Girl, I trust you with my drugs, might trust you with my money.”

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But even though that could be a hit, it’s an anomaly here. On “Blocka” Pusha T raps, “No SoundScan for a bricklayer,” and it’s not a lament. JON CARAMANICA

BEN GOLDBERG

“Unfold Ordinary Mind”

“Subatomic Particle Homesick Blues”

(BAG Production Records)

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The clarinetist Ben Goldberg, who has just released two new records simultaneously, builds his jazz out of isolated elements: hymns and chorales, as well as R&B vamps and loose strategies of rhythm and tonality descending from Ornette Coleman. He likes the collective tangle of New Orleans music and the howl of an electric guitar. He works for the benefit of the band, taking the role of a vamping bassist when he plays the contra-alto clarinet instead of the regular B-flat version, or improvising in sympathetic tandem with other musicians. He likes some rupture and grit in his rhythm section, and he extends the emotional sensibilities of jazz toward the comic or the tragic.

There: a description of Mr. Goldberg specifically. But the way to save time and describe him generally is that he is an early-’90s jazz musician, of the persuasion New Yorkers back then called “downtown,” even though Mr. Goldberg is from San Francisco. This was once almost a noncategory — more like a declaration of openness, of not going along with anyone’s program.

But even openness becomes circumscribed after a while. Both of his new albums, “Unfold Ordinary Mind,” with a quintet including the guitarist Nels Cline and two tenor saxophonists, Ellery Eskelin and Rob Sudduth; and “Subatomic Particle Homesick Blues,” with a mostly different quintet including the tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman, the trumpeter Ron Miles and the bassist Devin Hoff, have an almost classical and time-specific devotion to Mr. Goldberg’s set of ideals. Still, they’re focused and meticulous albums; they make, or revisit, the argument for what so much music of that time was trying to do.

He’s constructed his bands well, bringing together musicians with dissimilar backgrounds. “Unfold,” with Mr. Goldberg playing a lot of ostinatos on his low-pitched horn, leans on Mr. Cline — the lead guitarist of Wilco and not a traditional jazz guitarist — a little too hard. Mr. Cline’s fast-fingered solos, with spasmodic flutters of tremolo and lots of distortion and looping, all start to become a crutch. But he helps cement the aim of the music, which opens up songs into layered scrimmages of improvising and keeps linking rock and soul with jazz, so much that a few tracks sound as if they’re threatening to break out into the “Saturday Night Live” closing music or a Black Keys track. (Ches Smith, the drummer on both records, has a tremendous range of style but keeps coming back to the rude clank, the rogue rumble. He’s filling the role that would have been played in the ’90s by Jim Black or Joey Baron.)

“Subatomic,” drier and tamer from a distance but often more beautiful, goes further into the group dynamics of Ornette Coleman’s early quartets, in which the horns chased each other in an open relationship with harmony, and the rhythm kept a steady, changeable bounce. There’s a song with American-songbook-ballad roots that moves into semi-free improvisation (“How to Do Things With Tears”); an elegiac tune that moves into R&B (“Who Died and Where I Moved To”); and individual solos worth going back to, especially Mr. Redman’s solo on “Doom” and Mr. Miles’s on “Asterisk.” And there’s a feeling of joyous research too into the basics of polyphony and collective improvising, the constant usefulness of musicians intuitively coming together and pulling apart. BEN RATLIFF

Correction: February 18, 2013

The New Music column on Tuesday, which included a review of Pusha T’s mixtape “Wrath of Caine,” misidentified the number of volumes in the mixtape series “We Got It 4 Cheap” by Clipse, the duo of Pusha T and Malice, his brother. There are three volumes, not two.